III

After reciting the facts of the Incarnate life, to which we shall presently return, the Roman Creed proceeds, Et in Spiritum Sanctum, “And [I believe] in the Holy Ghost.” This clause opens the third division of the Creed, and thus corresponds to the clauses which confess the Father and the Son1; but whereas in the first and second articles the Name is followed by a personal definition, the confession of the Holy Spirit stands by itself, and the Creed passes on at once to other articles of belief. A comparison of the ‘Nicene’ Creed places this fact in a stronger light, for there the Holy Ghost is declared to be τὸ κύριον, τὸ ζωοποιόν, τὸ ἐκ τοῦ πατρὸς ἐκπορευόμενον, κ.τ.λ.; whilst the Western Creed affirms nothing beyond His existence. “It looks therefore,” Professor Harnack says, “as though the writer of the Creed did not conceive the Holy Ghost as a Person, but as a Power and Gift. This is indeed literally the case. No proof can be shewn that about the middle of the second century the Holy Ghost was believed in as a Person. This conception, on the contrary, is one of much later date, which was still unknown to most Christians by the middle of the fourth century. … In the Creed the Holy Ghost is conceived of as a gift, but as a gift by which the Divine life is offered to the believer; for the Spirit of God is God Himself.”
These words raise the whole question to what extent the doctrine of the coexistence of three hypostases in God was implicit in the faith of the second century. Since even in the fourth century the terminology of the doctrine was by no means fixed or uniform, no one will expect to find in writers of the second century a strictly accurate use of such words as οὐσία, ὑπόστασις, πρόσωπον. It will suffice if we can shew that the sub-apostolic age and that which succeeded to it were conscious of a distinction between God and the Spirit of God, analogous to that which was seen to exist between God and the Logos.
Such a consciousness betrays itself in a Roman document earlier than the Creed by perhaps half a century. When Clement of Rome asks, “Have we not one God and one Christ and one Spirit of grace which was poured out upon us1?,” whilst emphasising the historical manifestations of the Son and the Spirit, does he not at once distinguish Them from God and from Each Other, and yet coordinate the Three? When he permits himself the use of the adjuration, “As God lives, and the Lord Jesus Christ lives, and the Holy Spirit, the faith and hope of the elect2,” is it not fair to say that he claims for the Son and the Spirit a personal Life which is not absolutely identified with the Life of the Father, and yet is understood to be Divine?
Yet there is reason to think that by the middle of the second century the Church had gained a firmer grasp upon the conception of the Spirit’s personal distinctness than she possessed in the days of Clement. The growing use of the Fourth Gospel contributed to this result. Dr Harnack characteristically observes that this “cannot be shewn,” but it can at least be made probable. The ‘Paraclete’ appears together with the ‘Only-begotten’ in the Valentinian system, whilst Montanism called the attention of the Catholic Church to the Johannine title. “They called him (Vettius Epagathus) the Christian’s advocate, and he had ‘the Advocate’ within him1.” So wrote the Churches of Lyons and Vienne in a.d. 177. Tertullian gives the personal name a place in the Rule of Faith, and it is in the early Creed of Jerusalem, where it may have gained admission about the same period. But the free use of the masculine noun παράκλητος could hardly have failed to influence Christian thought. It did not originate the conception of the Spirit’s distinct personality, for we have seen that that was already latent in the words of the Roman Clement; but it gave fuller and clearer expression to the belief. Thus the Passion of Perpetua, written under Montanist influence, discriminates quite unambiguously between the Person of the Spirit and His work: “uiderint qui unam uirtutem Spiritus unius Sancti pro aetatibus iudicent temporum”;—“ut nouae quoque uirtutes unum et eundem semper Spiritum Sanctum usque adhuc operari testificentur2.” To Tertullian the Western Church owes the word trinitas, and although his Trinity is an ‘economy,’ i.e. is viewed chiefly in reference to the manifestation of God in human history, it is seen to be rooted in the inner life of the Godhead. The ‘persons’—he uses the term—are gradus, formae, species, and are at once inseparable and distinct (“inseparatos ab alterutro..testor..dico alium esse Patrem et alium Filium et alium Spiritum”); the Scriptures represent each Person as invested with a ‘property’ which is peculiar to Himself (“unamquamque personam in sua proprietate constituunt”); the Second and Third Persons are derived from the First—the Second immediately, the Third through the medium of the Second1. If this teaching, which comes from the first quarter of the third century, falls short of the theology of the third quarter of the fourth century, it does so chiefly because Tertullian has not grasped the timelessness of the mutual relations of the Divine Life, or the truth that the Second and Third Persons receive from the First the whole essence of the Godhead. Origen carries us many steps nearer to the full evolution of the doctrine. Christian tradition, he says, has left certain points with regard to the Holy Ghost’s manner of existence uncertain, yet it certainly places Him on an equality with the Father and the Son2, and regards Him as possessing spiritual life. And so far is Origen from ignoring the distinctness of the Holy Spirit3, that he goes to the length of suggesting that the Spirit, since He is neither the Father nor the Son, must be placed among the γενητά made by the Son1. He interprets Hab. 3:2 (LXX., ἐν μέσῳ δύο ζῴων γνωσθήσῃ) as referring to the Son and the Spirit2. In one place he directly distinguishes the χαρίσματα of the Spirit from the Person: “I think that the Holy Spirit supplies the saints with the material (if I may so speak) of the gifts that they receive from God, this material finding its essential ground (ὑφεστώσης) in the Holy Spirit3.” He realises more clearly than Tertullian that the Holy Spirit had no beginning of existence: “He would not have been reckoned in the Unity of the Trinity together with the unchangeable Father and the Son if He had not been always Holy Spirit.” He grasps the truth of His essential equality with the Father and the Son: “No relation in the Trinity can be said to be greater or less4.”
Arianism was in the first instance a protest against the Sabellian confusion of the Persons5. Arius spoke freely of three οὐσίαι or ὑποστάσεις6; and though in the long conflict that followed his condemnation the use of these terms was in some quarters abandoned or deprecated, no attempt was made to merge the personality of the Spirit in that of the Father or of the Son. The first Synod of Sirmium anathematises those who speak of the Three as “one person” (ἓν πρόσωπον), or identify the Holy Ghost with the Ingenerate God, or call Him a part of the Father or of the Son; whilst on the other hand it equally condemns a proposition which the Catholics certainly did not support, that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are three Gods1. From any positive statements about the Person of the Spirit the Arian Creeds usually abstain, contenting themselves with expressing belief in His operations; but the title Paraclete, which suggests personality, is used in these documents with remarkable frequency. Thus the last of the series (Constantinople, a.d. 360) confesses, “And [we believe] in the Holy Ghost, which the Only-Begotten Son of God Himself, the Christ, our Lord and God, promised to send to mankind as Paraclete (according as it is written), the Spirit of Truth; which He sent to them when He went up to Heaven2.”
We have now passed the middle of the fourth century, when according to Harnack’s view most Christians were still ignorant of the personality of the Holy Ghost; yet no trace of the assumed ignorance has met us hitherto. Jerome, indeed, charges Lactantius with a direct denial of the personality: “Spiritus Sancti negat substantiam, et errore Iudaico dicit eum uel ad Patrem referri uel Filium, et sanctificationem utriusque personae sub eius nomine demonstrari3.” But assuming that Jerome’s charge is well founded, Lactantius is the solitary champion within the Catholic Church of this “Jewish error.” It appears, however, to have been revived by certain members of the Macedonian party, who found themselves embarrassed by the question, ‘If the Holy Ghost be not God, who or what is He?’ The sounder thinkers and more reverent believers of the party shrank from calling Him a creature. Some fell back upon a confession of ignorance; others took the bolder course of representing the Holy Spirit as the Divine energy. The fact is mentioned by Gregory of Nazianzus, who describes adherents of this view as “some of our Christian philosophers1.” He is clearly thinking of non-Catholics; and since Eunomius distinctly opposed the tenet, and Augustine states that it was attributed by some to the Macedonians or Semiarians, we may fairly assume that it was practically confined to that party2. But that it had a very limited acceptance even amongst Semiarians seems clear from the silence of contemporary writers on the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit. If “most Christians about the middle of the fourth century” had still to learn that the Holy Spirit is personal, how came it to pass that the Catholic theology of the time was content to establish His Deity? Such a book as St Basil’s treatise on the Holy Spirit passes over the question of His personal existence altogether; the writer proceeds at once to his task of shewing that the personal Holy Ghost is Divine. What were the influences, or where is the writing, to which the Church owed her conversion to the doctrine of the personality of the Holy Ghost? “The scientific Greek theology of the day” is responsible for having moulded earlier conceptions into a consistent dogma, and provided them with a nicely balanced terminology; but it is certainly innocent of the creation of an idea which is as old as the Fourth Gospel and the Epistles of St. Paul, and which we have seen reflected continuously, although with varying distinctness, in Church teaching from the end of the first century.
But Professor Harnack proceeds: “Whoever, therefore, introduces the doctrine of the Three Persons of the Godhead into the Creed, explains it contrary to its original meaning, and alters its true sense. Such an alteration was, of course, demanded of all Christians from the end of the fourth century onwards, if they did not wish to expose themselves to the charge of heresy and its penalties.”
It is remarkable that this vital alteration in the Faith was not followed by an alteration in the Western Creed. That Creed was in a fluid state until the eighth century, yet no Western Church shewed the faintest desire to modify the articles which relate to the Son and the Holy Ghost. It would have been easy and even natural to transfer to the Western Creed the definitions of the Creed which was believed to have been accepted at Constantinople; and it may be with some confidence assumed that this would have been done if there had been the least consciousness on the part of the Western Church that she had executed the change of front imputed to her.
But there was no such consciousness either in East or West. The adherents of the Nicene theology protested from the first that they had changed nothing. The party represented at Nicaea by Eusebius of Caesarea have been called “the conservatives,” and the name may be justified by their dislike of new phraseology1; but conservatism in regard to the essentials of theology was characteristic of the stoutest advocates of the Homoousion. Arianism, not the Nicene Faith, was the real offender; the serious innovations were on the side of those who denied the proper Deity of the Son and of the Spirit. If the Catholics used new terms, they did so in order to guard old beliefs; “malo enim aliquid novum commemorasse, quam impie respuisse2” is Hilary’s sufficient answer to the charge of novelty. In the definitions subsequently introduced into the Creed of Jerusalem with the view of maintaining the Deity of the Holy Spirit, even verbal innovations seem to have been studiously avoided ; the new matter was drawn almost exclusively from Scriptural sources; the word ὁμοούσιον was not applied to the Spirit, nor was He even called God. It may be said that this anxiety to keep within the limits of a Scriptural vocabulary was the fruit of policy; but the careful student of the Catholic writers of this epoch will recognise in it a deeper purpose. From Athanasius to Gregory of Nazianzus there comes an unbroken appeal to Holy Scripture and Catholic tradition, which repels the unworthy suspicion that the great Nicene teachers were guilty of consciously tampering with the ancient faith.
Did they, then, unconsciously and against their will change the current of Christian thought, and create the doctrine of a hypostatic Trinity? Harnack elsewhere attributes the change more especially to the Cappadocians. It was the work of the second half of the fourth century. Let us, then, refer to earlier writers who cannot be suspected of Cappadocian orthodoxy. (1) The Creed of the martyr Lucian confesses that “the names of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are not mere otiose titles, but accurately represent the hypostasis, order, and glory proper to Those Who bear them, so that they are Three in hypostasis, although One in their perfect harmony (τῇ μὲν ὑποστάσει τρία τῇ δὲ συμφωνίᾳ ἕν)1.” (2) Eusebius of Caesarea, following the suggestion of Origen, speaks of the Holy Spirit as “the Third Power, above every created nature —first of all the intelligent essences which have their being through the Son, but third in order from the First Cause2.” (3) Cyril of Jerusalem, writing before the middle year of the century, teaches catechumens and the newly baptized: “Our hope is in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; we preach not three gods, but One God through One Son together with the Holy Spirit—we neither divide the Holy Trinity, as the manner of some is, nor work confusion, as the Sabellians do.” Of the Holy Ghost, Cyril remarks that He “is equal in dignity with the Father and the Son”; “the Spirit is a living principle and possesses a substantial existence (ζῶν καὶ ὑφεστός, ) and is ever present with the Father and the Son3.”
These statements vary in precision and in nearness of approach to the theology of the Cappadocian fathers; but they agree with one another and with the later teaching of the century in their practical recognition of a hypostasic Trinity. Yet the first two at least are less explicit than passages which might be quoted from writers of the third century, and the third is in harmony with the best teaching of the second. It is not pretended that the dogmatic language of individual teachers in the second century is always consistent with the riper convictions of the post-Nicene age. Like all pioneers, Justin, Tertullian, Origen, occasionally started on a false track; yet on the whole they moved upon lines which eventually led to the decisions of Nicaea and Constantinople. Of an essentially unequal Trinity, of a Son of God whose filial relations began with His human life, of an impersonal Spirit of God not to be distinguished from the ‘energy’ of the Father and the Son, they betray no knowledge. These were actual creations of the third century or of the fourth, and the Church disowned them as soon as their nature was clearly seen. The work of the great Nicene theologians was not primarily constructive; their first business was to refute novel and strange teaching. But the refutation of heresy has always served as an opportunity for a fresh illumination of the truth, and it was thus in the fourth century. The primitive faith in Father, Son and Holy Ghost, grew under the hands of the great Greek theologians into a dogma, i.e., it acquired philosophical expression and a fixed terminology. But it ought to be possible to distinguish between the formulation of a doctrine and its creation. According to Professor Harnack the theology of the Church was created by the genius of a handful of Catholic preachers and writers who lived in the second half of the fourth century. It has been the purpose of these chapters to shew that, while Catholic theology is indebted to these Fathers for much of its philosophical form and literary dress, its substance is due to the teaching of our Lord and of the Apostolic age, jealously preserved and gradually assimilated by successive generations of the Ante-Nicene Church.

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INDEX